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Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has dropped the assault charges against a Chinatown landlord who beat a homeless man after the vagrant attacked him with a weapon — and now the landlord says Bragg should never have brought the case against him in the first place.
Brian Chin, a 32-year-old graduate psychology student and teaching fellow at Harvard, pummeled the still-unidentified homeless man in late August when the man went after him with a nail-studded piece of wood.
Bragg’s office initially hit the married dad with felony assault charges but dropped the case last week —taking Chin out of the legal line of fire, but leaving him irate that he had to deal with the court proceedings to begin with.
“I am more angry than relieved because this is something that never should have happened,” Chin told The Post.
“I was treated like a violent perpetrator in the eyes of the law, and it has been five months of an unending, waking nightmare … I woke up every day thinking that I would spend years in jail when I never committed a crime.”
“This was a case that, from the very beginning, never should have been brought,” Chin said, adding that he had to resign from his teaching position because he could no longer pass a background check.
“What was this for? It upended my life, everything I spent decades working for.”
Chin’s troubles began after he spotted the vagrant lying on the ground outside the subway station at Chrystie and Grand Streets in Manhattan around 8:30 p.m. on Aug. 24.
Chin allegedly slipped on black gloves and kicked the unidentified man three times, according to a criminal complaint.
The vagrant woke up, but he and Chin went their separate ways after the encounter.
But they both came back a few minutes later, with Chin saying he returned because he was haunted by the horrific slaying of his renter, Christina Yuna Lee, two years ago.
“Especially after the murder, if someone is acting violent, I just like to stand by the front door, just to make sure that no one gets followed in, all my tenants are safe,’’ Chin said.
The homeless man did turn violent, breaking a wooden chair and swinging the nail-laden hunk of wood at Chin — who in turn knocked him down and punched him a half-dozen times before the assailant quit.
Blood gushed from the unidentified man’s face as he struggled to get to his feet when cops arrived, the complaint said. And when he tried to stand, he fell back and slammed his head into the subway station railing.
Authorities rushed him to Bellevue Hospital with facial and skull fractures, the complaint said. He was intubated and put on a ventilator afterward.
Chin said he had approached the man because he recognized him as a Grand Street panhandler and wanted to make sure he was OK.
“We have so many drug overdoses and deaths and pretty much every conceivable horror that you can imagine,’’ he said. “Immediately, he woke up after that and just started screaming.”
Chin tried to calm him down, but said he feared for his life during the fight — “I just wanted to get home to my wife and kids,’’ he said.
“I feel awful,” Chin said afterward. ” I never want anyone to get hurt.”
The charges — which could have landed the landlord in jail for up to seven years — hung over his head until Bragg decided not to pursue them.
“It’s our job to thoroughly investigate and prosecute violent conduct, including incidents of alleged assault,” a rep for the Manhattan DA’s office said Sunday.
“This case has been dismissed, and as a result, sealed by the court.”
But that’s little comfort for Chin, who said he believes it “personally abhorrent that this case was ever brought” — especially because the homeless man was later charged with menacing.
“With such an abundance of evidence from the very start, it was clear that I was not a perpetrator but a victim,” Chin said. “Instead of doing the right thing, he used his office to pursue a case against me for nearly five months.”
“It leads me to ask the question: How many other innocent people has he incarcerated? How many were not so fortunate as to have been attacked on their own property and to have access to surveillance footage showing their innocence?”
He compared himself to Jose Alba, the bodega worker who was famously charged with murder after stabbing an assailant inside his store — only to see his charges dropped in the face of public outrage.
“How many more victims — how many more Jose Albas, how many more cases such as myself — will need to be at his hands before the politicians who have continually shielded him wake up to the fact that this is not how justice is conducted in this country?”
“It’s not what New Yorkers deserve.”
His attorney, Kenneth Gilbert, agreed — and said the prosecutor saved faced by dropping the case before it could see the inside of a courtroom.
“If it had gone to trial, it would have been an embarrassment for the prosecutor’s office,” Gilbert said.
“For Alvin Bragg … it would have been an embarrassing situation, I think.”
English (US)